Winifred Hodge Rose
Images
Images: Brief, compelling, packed with nuances and implied, rather than stated, information and insights: these form so much of the foundation of what we think, understand and feel. Images are key to any religion or troth, and here I mean much more than static, physical images such as statues, paintings and buildings. I mean images of the imagination, which is where images truly form, shaped from outside stimuli. These images are sparked within us and among us by myths, tales, songs and poems, symbols, rites and rituals, art, discussions on meaningful subjects, reading, listening, thinking, personal and shared experiences. Images form much of the take-away that we gain from all of these activities; this is what really sticks in our memory. I use ‘images’ broadly to cover not only visual images, but those which are heard—auditory images like songs—and felt in other ways such as the emotional tone of a gathering of friends, a sumble or ritual, or the ‘stuff you actually remember’ from reading or listening to something of interest to you.
Images are what make PTSD so powerful and dreadful. Negative images gained from media and life experiences can erode the health of one’s souls and have unwanted effects on our lives and relationships, while positive images serve as inspiration and motivation. Images are pieces of active memory: the image still has real, immediate power for us; it is not just a register of events.
Within our troth, as with any other religion, there are so many images from our myths, lore and history that carry this kind of imagic power for us. I venture to say that much of what a religion or troth is, what it ‘does’ for us in all aspects of our lives, is presenting us with powerful images that shape our thoughts, feelings, motivations and actions. They can also serve as modes of communication and inspiration for our interactions with Holy Ones, ancestors and other spiritual beings. What is a harrow, fane, wihstead, hof, but a visual, tactile, spatial representation of an image in our minds, an image intended to facilitate interaction between us and Them?
Orlay (Anglo-Saxon) / Orlog (Old Norse) have much in common with images: both accrete in layers, shaping our perceptions, actions and reactions, and lay down more layers in turn. Take, as an example, a situation of “revenge.” A person seeking revenge is beset by images—powerful, active memories—of the harm his enemy has done him, and responds by creating his own images or envisionings of the harm he wants to return, as the primal step toward putting his thoughts into action. Images shape thoughts and plans, leading to deeds. The harmful deeds of his enemy most likely arose from orlay, then laid orlay in turn, then generate more orlay as the revenge and tit-for-tat proceed accordingly. Images and orlay accrete together within our life experiences, and shape more to come.
To set the image-tone of this article, I call upon Odin’s raven Muninn, an image of active memory infused with Odin’s eloquence and poetic power, his knowledge, wisdom and potency, whose task it is to gather images from Midgard and deliver them to him daily. We ourselves have an inner Muninn, one who ponders and remembers, whom we can call upon to be our ‘image manager’, to seek out and save images that contribute to our wisdom, experience, growth and well-being, and fly past images that offer only harm!
Ancient Images of Orlog
The ‘orlog of orlogs’, for humans at least, comes from the image of the three wise maids, the Norns, at Urdh’s Well underneath Yggdrasil. There they ‘lay laws, choose lives, speak orlog for the children of Aldr’ (Voluspa vs. 20 in ON, 21 in translation, Poetic Edda). Here it seems clear that orlog is something set for us, out of our control. As I have written about in previous articles, I believe that orlog comes to us through our Aldr soul, and one of many reasons I believe this is that in a number of instances we are told that the Norns ‘shape aldr’ (skapa aldr), as well as shaping orlog by their ‘speaking’. Both our Aldr and our orlay come from them.
Skirnir tells the giant herdsman guarding Gerda’s hall that ‘in one day was my aldr shaped, and all my life laid down’ (vs. 13, Skirnismal, Poetic Edda). This is a statement of courage in the face of the herdsman’s threats, telling him that threats are of no use. His Aldr-soul, his life, his orlog, and specifically his lifespan or length of life, are already set. He cannot avoid his wyrded end, so threats do not move him: his end will come when it will, and in the meantime he will get the job done.
The preponderance of usage of both orlog and Anglo-Saxon orleg or orlaeg indicate that usually those words did mean ‘the death we are fated to die’, rather than anything resulting from our actions during life. ‘Orleg’ is combined with many words in Anglo-Saxon referring to battle: orlege is battle or strife, orleg-gifre means ‘orleg-greedy’ or greedy for battle, orleg-weorc or orlay-work = battle, orleg-hwil or orlay-while is a time of war. Battle is an ultimate test of orlay: this is when we meet it face to face. This is also true of the formal ordeal, the time of testing through a duel or a great challenge to see who is right and true. Childbirth is a great ordeal both for the mother and for the child: both risk death by striving for life, both experience this time as one of high and fateful significance in their lives. Though the child is not conscious of the significance, it is recorded in his or her souls and influences their life.
Orlog Drygja
Although most instances in the lore imply that orlog or orlay is synonymous with one’s time and mode of death, established by outside forces, there are instances that offer more complex and nuanced interpretations. Here is one of the strongest.
In Lokasenna of the Poetic Edda, verses 22 through 24 show Odin and Loki insulting each other, dragging up old history about incidents when they behaved in a ‘perverted’ manner. In verse 25 Frigg scolds the two of them, saying that “The orlogs of both of you should never be told in front of others, what you two Aesir ‘carried out, fulfilled / endured / aligned with’ in days of yore…” The word ‘drygdud’ can translate to any of these words according to the dictionary, and I usually assume when reading Old Norse poetry that the poet intends for more than one meaning to be carried by a word or kenning whenever possible. On this assumption, Odin and Loki (a) ‘carried out, fulfilled, accomplished’ (active sense) their orlog of ‘perverted’ deeds; (b) ‘endured’ (passive sense) the orlog that forced them into ‘perverted’ deeds, and (c) ‘aligned’ their actions with orlog, presumably done deliberately in order to accomplish something important in spite of having to undertake ‘perverted’ deeds to do so. This shows some of the complexity of orlog: it is not only a simple, unidimensional phenomenon. And that is especially the case when it applies to the two beings in our lore who seem to have the most complex and convoluted motivations and behaviors of all!
There is another passage that uses the same interesting word ‘drygja’ with reference to orlog. The first verse of Volundarkvida (Poetic Edda) describes three Valkyries in swan-maiden form flying over Myrkwood and arriving at Wolfdales where Volund and his brothers live. The verse says that the Valkyries ‘orlog drygja’: they come to fulfill orlog, or to align people and events with orlog. This is certainly the case in the poem: after some years of marriage with the Valkyries and then the swan-maidens’ mysterious departure, Volund’s two brothers take off to seek their wives, and continue on to many other adventures told in Germanic legends. Volund is captured by brutal king Nidud because he is alone, despondent and unwary, waiting for his Valkyrie wife to return. As Nidud’s captive, Volund bears a heavy orlog, brings orlog-death to Nidud’s sons, and impregnates his daughter with a son who goes on to win fame in later Germanic heroic legends as Widia, Wittich, Vidigoia. The swan-maidens were the ones who set all these fateful events in motion: orlog drygja. (It’s interesting to note that swans swim in Urdh’s Well (Gylfaginning p. 19, Prose Edda)).
These two examples, with Odin and Volund, show that even in ancient writings there is some indication that orlog was more than simply the fated time and manner of death. There is still a strong implication that other beings—the Norns—are the source of the orlog, and that third parties like the Valkyries play a role in bringing orlog to pass, but the ‘orlog’ that occurs in both these examples is not ‘death’. It is a complex, cascading series of events, especially in the Volund example, which becomes more clear when we follow the long Volund / Weland saga—before, during and after Volund himself—throughout the Germanic hero-tales spanning many lands, languages and centuries. The same can be said of the Nibelungenlied / Volsungasaga, but that is far too dense to pursue here!
What If We Were Orlog-less?
Verses 17-21 of the Voluspa (Poetic Edda) tell us that three Aesir ‘find on land’ Ask and Embla (elsewhere they are called ‘trees’ although here we simply have their names) who are without orlog and without other gifts that add up to life and human-being-ness. I find this lack of orlog fascinating, because it implies that having orlog is an essential part of what it is to be human. After the Gods give Ask and Embla the gifts of human life, the next verses tell us about the Norns and their action of ‘speaking orlog’ for children of Aldr: human beings. I think this is all part of the same event: the Gods give their gifts, but the transformation into humans is not complete until the Norns ‘speak orlog’ for them.
What would it mean to be without orlog? Would this simply mean that the Norns were not involved in setting death for non-human beings such as trees? Somehow this doesn’t seem very momentous. Understanding orlog as being the ‘primal layers’, as the word literally means, leads in a more significant direction, enhanced by the fact that the Norns speak orlog and bathe the Tree with layers of mud on a daily basis, an ongoing process (Gylfaginning p. 19, Prose Edda).
So being without orlog can mean that there is no such thing as a meaningful sequence of events, layer building on layer, that leads to the existence of ‘history’, ‘experience’, ‘precedent’, and all that derive from that. Cause and effect would only be understood in an immediate sense, not in terms of long, complex patterns. How much of what we know as ‘civilization’ would even develop without the primal layers of knowledge, experience, learning, technology and all the rest forming the foundation for the next layer, generation after generation? Civilization itself can be understood as an accumulation of layers, building upon itself over time.
If we did not each possess orlog as a dynamic force shaping our lives (not only our deaths, but our lives too), then our lives and deeds would be random. There would be no pattern to our lives, no history, no non-random impacts on the world and on each other. Any significance associated with a deed would evaporate after it was done, because it would be left behind in time, not stored in orlog. There would be no reasons for our deeds and choices other than the impulses of the moment: neither past nor future would matter. We would indeed be like animals or non-humans. I think this is a profound understanding that the Voluspa poet offers here. Pondering the image of what life and the world would be like without orlog helps us to appreciate the positive value of this phenomenon.
Process Versus Substance
There’s a difference between the substance of orlog and the process of orlog. The process continues the same over time, and in both modern and ancient Heathen understanding, we use the metaphor of layers laid in the Well or plastered onto the Tree to describe this process. In Bauschatz’ beautiful imagery, the Tree sucks water from the Well, and after the water-sap runs through all the life and beings upon the Tree, drops the water down as dew, representing deeds and events. Significant deeds fall within the Well and are recycled back to the Tree; insignificant deeds fall outside the Well as ordinary dew. The process is also often described as weaving by the Norns, in common with images of fateful weavings in other branches of Indo-European myth. This process of orlog, however it is envisioned, is presumed to be unchanging.
The substance of orlog is a different matter: this consists of the layers which have already been laid. This cannot, by its very nature and definition, be the same now as it was when the Eddas and ancient poems were composed. Orlay itself has accreted many layers since that time: that is what it does. It grows and develops based on the layers continually being laid down, and those layers subtly influence the ones that accumulate above them. The World Tree, fed daily by the Norns, has grown, and the Norns have spoken daily, over the past thousand years, whether people are aware of this or not!
This is something to be mindful of, when we consider orlog: both the process (unchanging) and the substance (always accumulating and subtly changing) are called by the same word, and this can be confusing.
I suggest that it is a valid exercise to approach an understanding of the substance of orlog through modern ideas and thought processes. In elder times, orlog meant primarily “time and circumstances of death”, and this was not influenced by the individual but set by the Norns or Wyrd. Nowadays, influenced by modern scholarship and Heathen thought, and modern ways of thinking generally, we tend to think of orlog as something we mostly create ourselves (whether knowingly or not) through our choices and deeds during our lives.
If we understand that orlog-substance subtly reshapes itself through time, then it’s valid to believe that both the ancient understanding of orlog, and the modern one, are genuine. Over time, orlog-substance has shaped human thought and deeds, and been shaped by them in turn. Now orlog is something which we can influence by our choices and actions, more than was the case in the more fatalistic past. The process has stayed the same: layers laid down by choices and deeds. But the actors have been modified to include humans as well as Norns, and the output of the process includes the shape of our Werold, our whole life in time, as well as our wyrded end.
Bookhoard
Bauschatz, Paul C. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1982. Chapter IV.
Faulkes, Anthony, translator. Edda. Everyman, Charles E. Tuttle, Vermont, 1995.
Jonsson, Finnur, ed. De Gamle Eddadigte. G.E.C Gads Forlag, Kobenhavn, 1932.
Larrington, Carolyne, translator. The Poetic Edda. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.
This article was first published in Idunna: A Journal of Northern Tradition, #120, Summer 2019.